Epidemics, like the many plagues that have struck Europe (for example in 1347 at the start of the Hundred Years War and during the Thirty Years War in 1618-1648), have never ended a war in history, even though sometimes they have played a long-term role by weakening empires or exhausting the fighters.
There are two ways in which the current epidemic could play a role in the present conflicts in the Middle East:
– by inflicting unbearable casualties on the civilian population, which might then oppose any military interventions abroad or push the different sides in a civil war to find an agreement;
– by undermining the military capacities of one or several actors, thus changing the balance of power (e.g. the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier was struck by the epidemic in March 2020).
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